For this roast we settled on a 20g dose with 1.8 bar of pre-infusion pressure

13s until the first drip fell in the cup and then an extraction rate of 1g/s until we had 30g in the cup after 30s more had passed - 10s pre-infusion would be your target, achieved by tamping with slightly less pressure

These darker roasts get really ugly if you run the shot too long - they are more soluble than the lighter modern roasts so they give up their goodness with less water being driven through the puck - if you keep going you get really knotty over-extracted notes appearing in the cup and you dilute the body in the cup too

The card that came with the coffee said a brew weight of 37-39g, but then we realised that these were just generic instructions for espresso extraction, rather than specific instructions for this roast

Once we realised that we cut the shot weight to 30g and everything sang

Very happy with where we got to here and in reflection i wished i had tried cutting the Epic shorter to a conventional 3g brew weight too as i think it would taste a lot better - it just isnt roasted light enough to carry the extraction to 38g